Saturday, March 29, 2014

"...The Economist, a venerable publication founded in 1843 for the purpose of advocating repeal of the Corn Laws..."

For the New Emperors
Monocle, the bible of cosmopolitan elites, turns seven.
By Kevin D. Williamson
"But The Economist, a venerable publication founded in 1843 for the purpose of advocating repeal of the Corn Laws, has some competition, in the form of its considerably hipper seven-year-old cousin,Monocle, founded and edited by the Canadian journalist and entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé. It is a magazine that is in general focused on a particular brand of well-heeled global urbanism, the go-to source for articles on the soft power of native Finnish people (“On top of the world: Why the Sámi people are in pole position”), how not to be a bad tourist (“Indonesia’s significant attractions seem to have been overlooked by tourists who flock to Southeast Asia. And that’s a great shame, says Monocle’s Aisha Speirs”), such new-urbanist obsessions as bicycling (“Kenji Hall goes for a little bike ride — in the middle of traffic-clogged Jakarta with the city’s governor, a Spanish MotoGP world champion and the ambassador of Denmark”), second-tier global cities (“Evolution theory: There’s more to Darwin than cyclones and crocodiles”), etc. It can be a little precious at times — Monocle doesn’t have bureaus, it has bureaux — but Mr. Brûlé and his colleagues have something that is notably lacking in many publishing concerns, that being a sense of how to make money and what to do with it, and an admirable entrepreneurial spirit. Rather than simply selling advertisements for high-end goods, it sells goods itself, funding the opening of its Hong Kong bureau from sales at its London retail shops. It operates a radio station and cafés, and partners with like-minded designers to market goods directly to its readers. It commissions short films and shows them on its website. The result of this large-minded entrepreneurship was a 2013 operating profit of 48 percent and $3 million worth of traditional advertising in its December-January 2013 issue."

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